one for the home office and one to replace that more expensive Symmetrix I'm about to unplug :)

Joking aside, how much of this software is included with the base cost and how much is a la carte and sold in tiers?

Paris, because she likes things that get bigger...and faster

EMC install plans are rubbish. We have almost $300K allocated in a SAN update project and so far we have had 2 Project managers, 2 salespeople (one of which kept asking for money after getting a quote, 12+ architect revisions, 4 Engineers on site, and of course the multiple visits from our 1 CE. Oh, and there are still errors showing on the Celerra management site.

Think yourself lucky you don't have IBM site. I've seen them turn up with 5 salesmen, 2 consultants from Glasshouse, 3 PMs and 0 techies...

As for the Celerra errors; insist that they install the latest patch level of 5.5 (I think its 5.5.35.0), but don't use 5.6 unless you are using the new functionality it gives you... Also reboot the heads (and SPs in the integrated device) in sequence and the errors may go away. Also reboot the CLARiiON SPs if you are using gateways to CLARiiONs (don't ask).

Mine's the one with the flash drive in the pocket.

Install plans are built in conjunction with the in-house technical team. If your plan is rubbish you may be saying more about yourself and your teams abilities than you would care to admit to in public...

It is the job of a competent presales consultant to methodically evaluate both the requirement and the customer's ability both to frame that requirement realisticly and execute the resulting solution correctly. If your result is a rubbish customer experience then you may be saying more about yourself and your presales abilities than you would care to admit to in public...

Ah, you fell for the unified storage pitch, eh?

The golden rule is KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid.

Fibre channel has been around for 10 years, is stable and works well.

iSCSI is a wonderful thing- simple, straight forward and for the most part easy to implement.

Unified storage has 4 SPs, Celerra GUI, Navisphere GUI, spaghetti cabling and a lot of quals, firmware, caveats, etc.

Sure it works well, but really did you need to do NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FC all at the same time off the same device, or would you have been better off just choosing the one that really fit your business and sticking with it?

I've seen this product work well, but typically it's because the customer is using a single protocol and not multiple ones.

So choose iSCSI or FC. Need some NAS on top of your block IO? Just use a simple Windows (CIFS) or Linux (SAMBA) server.

BTW, this has nothing to do with a CX4 - That's the new Clariion. What you bought was a Clariion with integrated NAS heads. At least you can always switch off the NAS part and just go straight to the CX and use the FC part of this to hook up your servers. Good luck.

Navisphere manager is included for four hosts, tiered for more in one or two tiers. In practice every just gets the enterprise license, it's not very expensive.

SnapView, MirrorView, Analyser are all one off costs rather than tiered. Recoverpoint is a separate product more or less.

@Simon - Glasshouse have *consultants*? Scary.